Community Management, Emotional Labor and Building Better Professional Relationships
Tara McMullin is a wordsmith, podcast maestro, and creative mind deeply entrenched in the realm of understanding the present and future of work. Tara sat down with us to discuss, among other things, community management, emotional labor, our relationship with work and how these intertwine to influence how we connect as human beings.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How would you describe the focus of your work right now?
My work today is really about looking at what's going on in culture and media and the online world and thinking about it through the lens of independent work and the future of work.
I think work is changing, our relationships to work and to ourselves as workers are changing. I think we're in a period of really rapid economic evolution and a lot of that is going in ways that are very anti-human and definitely anti-worker. A lot of the social contracts that we've had around work for the last 50, 60, 70 years are being broken open in ways that are making life really, really hard for people who work, which is just about everybody.
A lot of the social contracts that we've had around work for the last 50, 60, 70 years are being broken open in ways that are making life really, really hard for people who work, which is just about everybody.
- Tara McMullin
Those same ripple effects then go through all other sectors of the economy as well. So whether you are someone who owns assets, owns businesses, an entrepreneur or someone who doesn't work, I'm really interested in how our discourse around work impacts all of those different groups of people and how we can figure out how we can make the 21st century economy something that does work for more people than historically, a capitalist economy has worked.
There's certainly been a shift, particularly in the last couple of years to your work. It seems linked to the start of your podcast, "What Works" and the conversations with business owners. Was there a specific catalyst for this latest evolution in the nature of your work?
[Check out Tara’s podcast here!]
I see the work that I do today as both pretty different from the work that I was doing before and also a continuation of that. From a very early age, one of the questions that's been a driving factor for me has been, why do people believe what they believe and how does that impact what they do in the world?
Why do people believe what they believe and how does that impact what they do in the world?
-Tara McMullin
The first few years I was an independent worker, I was a business owner and those questions were closer to the fore. Then, as I became more successful and as I started getting busier and as people were asking me for different things, those questions started to settle down into the background a little bit more.
In 2016, 2017, 2018, those questions started making themselves very known to me again. They only became more emergent and more salient over those years, and so the last two to three years, I've been very explicitly asking these questions.
Why do we believe what we believe and how does that change what we do in the world? And just looking at it through the language of work and the language of business and sometimes the language of personal growth, because those things are all related as well.
Over the years, you've also led and hosted communities around these conversations. How has your community responded to this shift in these conversations and how has that affected your business?
Up until the end of 2021, business-wise it was very much a continuation. So I started in 2009, but the bulk of the business that I ran for a long time was, let's say, 2011 to 2021 was pretty continuous from an evolutionary standpoint.
The end of 2021, I essentially stepped out completely of that business and so, for as many pivots as I've done, or as many pivots as people perceive me having made over the years, that was the first time I completely severed the commercial relationship that I had with everyone. It was a complete need to be done with it and I'm sure we're gonna talk about that.
But it was mental health and just sheer exhaustion, sheer burnout and deep, deep depression. I had to get out of that business for health reasons. I had to get out of the position that I was in in terms of the leadership of those groups and so from December 2021 until today, the business that I have been running really isn't a business at all. I would say that what I do is way more akin to freelance writing, freelance podcasting and I still have the business that I run with my husband, Sean, which is Yellow House Media.
Obviously I was terrified of that decision to step away from that business and terrified of disappointing people and having to let people go and not being able to follow through on what I felt I had promised them. But I've been shocked at just how consistent people have been. I just hosted a workshop yesterday for Yellow House and there were people that were members of the What Works Network who took Quiet Power Strategy. Like they're still there, they're still following along, even though I had to make that really hard personal decision for myself.
My audience and my communities have evolved with me and I think most people that were invested whether that was financially or just emotionally with me came along for the ride. They were seeing the same sorts of things that I was seeing and had questions and I was willing to take those questions and wrestle with them and that then kind of evolved how I was doing what I was doing and for whom. Obviously people fall away or there's a negative response here, a negative response there, but generally, no problem.
Can you tell us more about the symptoms you experienced that signaled the need to step away? How did you navigate and cope with burnout from community management?
We worked really hard at the What Works Network to have a flexible but firm structure around the community. We had community policies and a full-time community manager. But as the environment, both online and in the wider culture, shifted between 2017 and 2021, we were running into more and more road bumps.
Something that cropped up in the last couple of years is that I learned that I am autistic. My experience of autism means that I see what people need; I see their underlying motivations, I see the code that's underneath how they're presenting to the world because I have to rationally and consciously construct those things to understand social context. I see that really well. What I'm not good at is personally dealing with those things. I was in a position where when something difficult came up in the day to day, I was the go-to person for figuring out how to handle it. I could rationalize and consciously help someone work through figuring out a situation and a path forward, but it was incredibly taxing work for me.
I also put on myself a very real expectation that when I showed up on Crowdcast or Zoom, I had to look, speak and behave in a certain way. I had an experience in August 2021, Sean and I were about to hop on a client call and I had just been crying because I was so just broken down that whole month. If you know me, that is not a thing that I do if I'm healthy. The call started, the camera came on and I put a huge smile on my face and when I saw myself in the camera I couldn't recognize myself at that moment. The person on the screen was not me. It was this weird, very tangible, concrete experience of dissociation that I was unfamiliar with and it scared the crap out of me.
At that point, I told my therapist what was going on and I thought ‘I can't do this anymore’. It was a realization and I basically had the same conversation with my full time community manager. It was then when I really started to think: what's my next step? Where do I go from here? How do I rearrange things so that it's better for me, so that I can handle this better? Being able to admit that put a lot of things into motion that allowed me to wind things down and then step away at the end of that year.
I think a lot of people, no matter their job, can relate to the pressure of putting on a certain type of performance at work. There's a degree where that’s healthy and sustainable but then there are times, like what you experienced, where there is this massive mismatch between the what you’re feeling inside and what you’re showing outside. What effect does this have on us?
Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work on emotional labor is super important for anyone who's wanting to understand what community management, community leadership, moderation does to a person. She wrote a book in 1981, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling, where she spent a lot of time looking at these very different jobs in which people are required to perform emotionally. She talks about how flight attendants have to fix their face If someone's yelling at them. They have to remain calm and smile in the face of people being awful, abusive, aggressive, and they have to stay calm. So it doesn't matter what you're feeling on the inside, you have to project this particular emotion.
With call center people or with debt collectors, It's the complete opposite thing. You might be deeply empathizing with the person on the other end of the phone and you have to maintain this outward power and shaming attitude toward the person on the other end, no matter what you feel for them. This sort of manufactured separation between internal emotional state and external emotional state within the context of work is then what she calls emotional labor.
Hochschild talks about how emotional labor has mental and emotional consequences, the same way manual labor has physical consequences. Dissociation and self-alienation are some of those consequences, but you also lose the ability to understand how you are feeling inside. If 10 hours a day you are performing an emotion that's different from the emotion you are feeling, you actually lose the capacity to identify that internal emotion.
When we can't identify things, we're not actually feeling them, we're not actually able to respond to them. How do you do self-care if you're not able to recognize when you are in need of self-care because it's been worked out of you?
How do you do self-care if you're not able to recognize when you are in need of self-care because it's been worked out of you?
- Tara McMullin
I just so love that she's willing to say, This [emotional labor] has real consequences. This is just as consequential as manual labor. We need to address them differently, but it's something that we need to take really seriously. It's definitely true in these very sort of affective jobs, but it's also true for just about anyone in the knowledge economy.
The expectations on our emotional states and our outward presentation is so great, especially when we're communicating online and we don't have all of the same resources that we do when we're communicating in person. Via Zoom we're having to gesture more wildly, smile really big, eyes open wide, sit up straighter and nod. Nowhere else are we doing that.
In a nutshell, it is what these jobs do to us, it's what these online platforms do to us, and it's not a problem as long as we know that it's happening, that we're compensated for it and that we are given the space and resources to take care of ourselves. And that's what doesn't happen in the vast majority of online communities, or offline communities, for that matter.
When you were in the role of a community leader, you were actively creating a space for others, but what about the community for you as the leader? Where did you find that support? And how has this dynamic changed?
For me, the social interaction I have to do for work, the things that I get paid for at that time, did not allow me to have social interaction on a basis where I could show up in a community. I don't have an answer to this particular problem, but there is no community that I could go into that I knew of where somebody didn't know who I was. You can't ask for help, you can't talk about your problems with a client, because that's traceable. It's not hard to figure out who I'm talking about.
We deal with it now too, as podcasters, where would I go to get help on a client problem that we're having? There's nowhere. People know the shows we produce. You might not be able to run down a list of it, but it wouldn't take long if someone wanted to figure it out. It's really lonely on top, and that's something I hear from other people over and over again.
I do have personal relationships with Kate Strathman or Kate Tyson, Charlie Gilkey. Not lots but a core group of people that I can talk to, but I can't talk to them if I don't have the bandwidth for it. Part of what needed to happen, with me stepping away from the community, was reclaiming my bandwidth for relationships that were more reciprocal.
I was getting to the point where Sean was getting so upset with me because I literally couldn't talk to him at night. I couldn't talk to him in between calls. I had nothing left for him. It's changed very, very slowly.
One of the things that I've had to kind of come to terms with over the last couple of years is that I just don't need lots of friends. So many people don't get that. I've got my husband and I've got a couple of people that I text message with, and there are lots of people like Isaac, that I have so much affection for, but I probably couldn't keep up a two-sided conversation for more than an hour once every couple of years. That's just how I'm wired.
How do we address the challenge of building a genuine community when the concept of thought leadership creates a cycle where people find it difficult to seek help or foster inclusive connections, especially when striving to be “at the top”?
I really like the definition of community, where we're talking about community as mutual concern for each other, so the sort of informal relationships that I might have on Substack or on LinkedIn, to me, is not community. I'm glad to be able to be a part of those, but it's not something that I feel like I belong to. It's not something that I feel is long-term or anything more than an ephemeral relationship.
I think that part of where I find community is just immersing myself in the work of others, and that is reading a lot of books, listening to even more podcasts, and now, just in the last couple of months, I've switched my newsletter over to Substack, and Substack is a really cool place where writers are doing really cool things. There's plenty of crap on it, too, but there is a large contingent of people who are just thrilled to be able to talk writer to writer on a daily basis, so that's been really great as well.
I find my quote-unquote community by actually engaging with other people's work and my dream is that my work fills that role for someone else too. I don't have to be DMing with them or replying to comments for them to feel like I've thought about them and realizing that they are one of thousands but still that I've considered their needs, their questions, their deviations from the norm and that I've made work for them.
You were talking earlier about work being anti-human, how can we become more pro-human? What new ways are people looking to connect with each other through this year and beyond, especially on the heels of a pandemic?
I think people don't know how they want to connect. I see a lot of very blank faces when I talk to people. It's like, well, I don't want to do this platform anymore, or I don't want to do it in this way, but I don't know what to do. I don't know how to meet people, I don't know how to talk to other podcasters, I don't know how to talk to other writers. What can I possibly do?
There's a lot of acknowledgement that things are very broken online and offline, that the tools that we've been given have not delivered on what they claimed they were going to deliver on, whether that's Zoom, or Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or whatever. We're not being served by them.
The piece that I wrote today was on how we make meaning online keeping in mind that any way that we are performing online and any way that we are constructing or creating meaning online is a conscious act.
It is the thing that we are doing for a certain purpose, and anything that we can do to bring more awareness to how we interact with other people, how we see other people, being aware of what's called our intersubjectivity. Recognizing that I am human and that you are human, and then engaging on those terms. Not I am a human, you are a user, or I am a human, you are an avatar. That's where communication breaks down. That's why platforms break down. It's why communities break down.
And it's platform agnostic right, you can still do it on Facebook, you can still do it on Twitter if you want to, you can do it anywhere. But it's that jump to recognizing the humanness in the other person that, I think, is the key to remembering that you yourself are human and remembering that work is a human endeavor.
Because culture, capitalism, all of these systems are constantly pushing us toward more and more machine-like behavior, and that's not some weird AI thing that I’m getting up on a soapbox about. If you're asking yourself if you're performing efficiently today, or whether you were productive enough today, you are talking about yourself in terms of machines. These are machine terms or agricultural terms. They're not human. And so, the more that we start to become conscious that when I'm talking about how productive I am, that is not an appropriate measure of my human value today.
If you're asking yourself if you're performing efficiently today, or whether you were productive enough today, you are talking about yourself in terms of machines. These are machine terms or agricultural terms. They're not human.
- Tara McMullin
If I want to be more productive, cool. But where am I drawing attention to my human value and the humanness of the value that I'm creating? Or the value that I'm engaging with or the value that I'm consuming. Those are the things I think that are going to help us build whatever's next.
I said to someone this week that if anything could, if any one word could, describe the period that we're in online and the media that we're consuming and creating online. It's turbulent. We don't know what's on the other side of this. We know that Mark Zuckerberg is gonna find new ways to sell data and put ads in front of us. We know Elon Musk is gonna do something wild on Twitter next week. I don't know what it's gonna be, but it's gonna be weird and it's gonna look real dumb. I know that Substack is gonna make a decision I don't agree with. I know those things and I know that, as long as I keep coming back to awareness of my humanity and your humanity, that I will be able to figure out what the right next step is for me.
How do we help people who struggle with this concept of recognizing their humanity beyond their roles as workers or managers? How do we encourage them to move towards a more holistic understanding of their roles and value?
I ask myself this question every single day. I think when we're in conversation with someone, or when we're teaching a group, or when we're standing in front of an event, what's most important is to be open to questions. If someone's beating themselves up about how productive they are or aren't, or how efficient they are or aren't, why is that important to them? Where did they find that message? Where did that come from? What are they afraid is going to happen if they don't become more productive, or don't become more efficient?
Some of those fears are about real things and real consequences, because we live in the society that we live in, but acknowledge the next thing and the next thing after that. When I'm trying to unpack these things, It is baby steps. This is what you're feeling, thinking, doing. I'm gonna repeat that back to you. Let me make sure that I've got this. Then, have you ever thought about this question before? Have you ever thought about this assumption before? Okay, let me tell you where I think this might be coming from, and then let me tell you where that came from. And then let me tell you where that came from after that. Really breaking it down, so that we're not ever asking people to make a leap that they're not ready to make.
On a super practical level, a tool that I really love is The Immunity to Change Framework by Robert Kegan and Lisa Leahy, and this framework is about understanding why we don't change the things that we say we want to change. If I want to stop forgetting the laundry in the dryer, which is my number one thing that I do. Why, if I say that I want to change that, why won't I? Because I can tell you now I won't. So the idea is that you walk through sort of understanding, not just this bad habit you want to change, but you start to understand what they call your competing commitment. What, underneath that desire for change, are you actually more committed to? Because we all have them.
If there's something that you want to change and you're not changing it, there's a competing commitment there and underneath that there's an assumption about why or how that commitment is actually more important. Right. They kind of leave off with a big assumption and you work to change the big assumption, then you can change the competing commitment and then you can change the thing you actually want to change.
I like to look at that big assumption not just for what it is, but for where it came from. What are the identity aspects of that? What are the political aspects of that, the social context around it? It's not enough to just know that this thing exists. We also have to know who the stakeholders are, how our class, our status is involved in that. Until we know those things we can't really unpack that big assumption.
When I'm talking to someone who's maybe newer to these ideas, or when I'm writing, or putting a talk together, how do I get to the big assumption? And then how do I unpack that assumption through these sorts of political and systemic layers so that I can show people it's not you, you aren't the problem, it's these other things. And now that we know that it can be our choice and our responsibility to figure out how to live in these systems as long as they exist, in a way that works for us and in a way that is resistance to those systems.
You can listen to the audio version of this interview on our podcast ‘Make it Kickass’ here.